If we want Wikipedia to be not just a "free encyclopedia," but a "high- quality free encyclopedia," something needs to change.
Here's an idea. Let's combine "cleanup" and "deletion" into "articles for improvement". Any article which hasn't improved in one month, and isn't a featured article, can be listed, along with a note on areas for improvement. If no one adopts the article and addresses at least some of the issues of it within 2 weeks, it gets deleted. I'd go for that, as long as we limited nominations to say 5 per person per day.